When Jon Colley was at school in Yorkshire, he was every teacher’s proverbial worst nightmare. When not playing truant, he was disrupting lessons for everyone else. He left at 16 with no qualifications.

Twenty-five years later, Colley is going back to school to help today’s versions of his young, feckless self. The fact that he can owes everything to two remarkable institutions: the Army, where Colley has spent all his adult life; and SkillForce, a charity that harnesses the unique skills of former Armed Forces personnel to provide inspiring role models for schoolchildren.

SkillForce has been working with schools for more than a decade, its mainly ex-military instructors supplementing the core curriculum by taking classes on topics such as community and character. This year, they’ve launched a new scheme called “Military to Mentors”. Between now and July 2012 they plan – supported by two other charities – to train 100 former service personnel to be one-on-one mentors for children with behavioural problems.

For Colley, the course was as much of a godsend as the Army had been a quarter of a century ago. Then, he had accompanied some friends one day after school to a recruiting office. Despite having no intention of joining, he started chatting to one of the recruiters and thought, actually, I could probably do this. “It was the best thing I ever did,” he says. “My teachers said I wouldn’t last a week. I had a point to prove.”

Colley, who saw action in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Bosnia and Iraq and rose to the rank of colour sergeant, has spent the past two and a half years with an Army recruiting team in Strensall, near York. During this posting, he particularly enjoyed taking schoolchildren on expeditions as part of the Army’s outreach programme. “We generally find that the children the teachers point out as the nightmares are the ones who excel,” he says.

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Contemplating a career in teaching after the Army, he studied in his spare time for a Bachelors in Education at the University of Huddersfield. However, the chance offered by Military to Mentors to work with difficult children was more appealing.

“I can relate to the kids SkillForce deal with,” he says. “I was one of them. They see many teachers as having nothing in common with them – the A-star students they’ll never be.”

Colley is one of five future mentors nearing the end of SkillForce’s first 10-week course. They have spent four weeks in Nottinghamshire, practising basics such as first aid, as well as more advanced mentoring techniques. The rest of the time has been spent in schools mentoring children one-to-one. At the end, SkillForce will try to get them relevant jobs.

Not all the participants were so ill-suited to the classroom. Nikki Langston, who spent 22 years as a medical assistant in the Royal Navy, says she was “pretty much a goody two shoes” at her school in Hull. Everton Williams, 54, who spent almost 35 years in the Royal Irish Regiment, “cruised through school without really being pushed”.

What they all have in common is an admirable level of commitment and passion. Although the course is funded by a grant from the Department of Education, there is no money for travel, accommodation or subsistence. Langston, 40, who left the Navy in August, has been driving up from her home in Portsmouth and staying in a nearby B&B. “They’re used to me being away,” she says of her husband and the five children, aged five to 18, they have between them. Williams, a youthful grandfather, has been staying in a local youth hostel and driving back to Manchester at weekends.

For them, too, the decision to sign up with SkillForce was an easy one. Langston, who was one of the first women in the Navy to go to sea, had enjoyed teaching cadets at weekends. “There was some messing about,” she says. “They’re young. But they really soaked it up. Seeing how proud they were, I thought, this is what I want.”

Williams, meanwhile, has spent the past 12 years working with young people in Army recruitment, which involved some informal mentoring. For his work experience, he was assigned to a group of children in Manchester who were so challenging that they are educated apart from the rest of the school. Over a series of one-to-one sessions, he felt he made some headway. “On a one-to-one basis, they’re the politest set of kids that you’re likely to meet anywhere,” he says.

Bad behaviour, he explains, is more likely to manifest itself in a classroom, where children falling behind would disrupt a lesson as a coping strategy. “You try to get them to look at it from another angle: to see if they are prepared to take steps to help themselves,” he says.

There are few quick fixes. “As a mentor you have to expect them to move backwards as well as forwards,” says Williams. “The key is for you not to give up on them. They might expect that. It might be a test. They might think: let’s see what he does when I do something bad. If he’s that good a mentor, will he live by what he says? Or will he walk away like countless people in the past have done to me?”

Back in the training centre, Colley is listening intently to a lecture on first aid, answering fluently when asked to explain the difference in CPR for adults and infants. He’s at no risk of being excluded now.

Would he have reacted well to a SkillForce person talking to him when he was younger, I wonder. “Yes,” he says instantly.

Colley is applying for a job for a SkillForce project called Zero Exclusion, which takes at-risk children, educating them at off-school sites. I hope he gets it.